


we are transparent not opaque

by besselfcn



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Dreams vs. Reality, Jon's healing powers, M/M, Mild Gore, Non-Consensual Somnophilia, Rape/Non-con Elements, Wound Fucking, kind of, wound fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:08:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26215390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: There’s a thin, nearly invisible line of scar tissue that sits between Jon’s sixth and seventh rib.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 11
Kudos: 62





	we are transparent not opaque

**Author's Note:**

  * For [felineladyy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/felineladyy/gifts).



> Happy birthday to my newest friend Jess; I feel very grateful to know you!
> 
> Note for the curious reader: Elias doesn't actually take his dick out here but it's definitely metaphorically sexual and definitely non-metaphorically non-consensual. Take that as you will!

There’s a thin, nearly invisible line of scar tissue that sits between Jon’s sixth and seventh rib. It’s on the left side; when he isn’t paying attention, he finds his right hand drifting towards it, half a hug wrapped around his own torso, fingers pressing at the edges beneath his shirt. 

When he _is_ paying attention, he does his best to ignore it.

He doesn’t sleep much. He never slept much, bu he catches sleep in fits and starts: five minute naps at his desk and an hour or two of restless tossing and turning on a cot in document storage. In part, the lack of sleep is practical; he doesn’t need it, so he doesn’t use it. In part, it’s avoidant. When he sleeps — no matter how long, no matter how fitfully — he dreams. 

His dreams often sprawl through London, through Europe, through the world. Children huddled around night lights; people in their homes smashing spiders underfoot with a shudder; a hospital waiting room filled with the cloying scent of antiseptic and anticipation. He wakes up itching for them; to _know_ them, to _See_ them. 

Sometimes, though, he dreams of the Archivist.

He dreams in memories of dreams; dirt and rot and loss and and and and. He dreams of the grating hum of a circus cacophony. He dreams of a lack of forgiveness.

He dreams of an Eye standing over him, fingers gentle against his sticky, grime-damp hairline. 

“Hello, Jon,” the Eye says, in Elias’s voice. “You’re coming along nicely, you know. A wonderful little miracle you pulled, coming out of the circus in one piece.”

He tries to remember how to breathe. Muscles spasm, but the wrong ones. 

“Do you want to see what you’re capable of now, Jon?”

The thing that is shaped like Elias holds a scalpel. He does not know where he got it. He got it from a nurse’s cart when she was talking to a patient. 

“I think a demonstration is very much in order for the both of us, don’t you?”

The scalpel peels apart the skin. A yawning red mouth blooms across the Archivist’s ribs. The monitors spike as if in memory of pain, but the dream holds none of it. 

“Ah, ah,” Eias says as the mouth begins to close. He stops the knitting together of flesh with a swift and elegant motion; his fingers sliding inside, all the way to the second knuckle. Just the three; he doesn’t manage to get his little finger in before it sews shut around him, hugging them in place.

“Oh, Jon,” Elias breathes, enraptured. “Ought I still call you Jon, do you think?”

The Archivist does not think anything at all. 

Elias’s fingers move, then. _This_ the dream transmits — not a memory of pain or loss as his fingers prod and poke at the soft meat of Jon’s fascia and muscle fibers, but a memory of _longing_. A memory of _more, bigger, deeper_ , as the Eye begs for Elias to peel Jon apart at the seams and pull and pull and _pull_ until it can see all that he is; every organ, every nerve ending, every ragged bone and blood vessel laid out bare so that all that is left is the pieces of what he was. 

Jon wants nothing, has never wanted anything, will never want anything again because he is dead and Elias’s fingers are stroking at his lung tissue as if to bring his lifeless body to a horrible climax. 

But the Archivist.

The Archivist wants to be consumed. 

Elias slides his fingers in and out, twisting and laughing to himself as if in some beautiful joke. Nerves explode in the Archivist’s mind; blood pours sluggishly from Jon’s body. Later, when Elias remembers this moment in his own fantasies, he will not know which one set him alight.

When he is done, pulling his fingers out tears at the edges of the skin where it had sealed around his fingers. The wound hangs open for a moment, awaiting the next intrusion; then, when it does not come, it knits itself together again, from the inside out. 

Elias gently places his fingers in his mouth to clean the blood from them as he watches the thin white line form across the ribs. 

“Well, then. I should be getting back before they notice I’m away.” His fingers, clean and dry, rake through the Archivist’s hair. “You’ll know where to find me when you wake.”

And then he does, and the dream is over.

Jon does not know how much of this dream he believes. It feels improbable, or maybe impossible; he doesn’t know the difference, these days. It feels as likely as anything else that this was a sick misfiring of his literally dying brain, and that the scar between his ribs is from the shrapnel of a plastic explosive.

Still. When he finds himself in need of the Boneturner’s services, it seems not a stretch at all to ask him to take a rib. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Sick](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziWmqGlGESQ) by Westbam.
> 
> Comments are always wonderful <3


End file.
